The Forbidden Rose (3 page)

Or she could stand here like an idiot. She was a battlefield of possibilities.

The big man said, “There’s broken glass all over. Watch your feet. And don’t bring the donkeys in.” A Breton voice. This was a man from the oldest, the least civilized, province of France.

He didn’t start poking through the ruins. He stood and thought a great deal about what he was seeing. She did not wish to deal with a man who came here with more in his mind than straightforward looting.

 

 

WILLIAM Doyle, British spy, stood in the French rain and thought about destruction.

Decorum and Dulce balked at the gate. Laid their ears back and refused to set hoof on the open gravel in the courtyard. They didn’t like the stink of burning. They smelled death, maybe. Something they didn’t like, anyway.

Wise as cats, those beasts. The boy hadn’t learned to appreciate them.

There weren’t any remains lying about in an obvious way. No bodies hanging from the trees like ripe fruit. Always the possibility somebody was tucked away in a corner, dead.

Dulce snaked out to bite Hawker. Missed him by a hair. The boy was getting downright nimble, wasn’t he?

“Rutting bastard of a—” Hawker dodged, “sodomite monk.”

He learned that one from me. I am just a shining example to youth.
The boy had come to him speaking some French. He was improving the lad’s vocabulary.

The donkeys were what he’d call a pointed lesson in how to deal with a problem you couldn’t out talk and couldn’t stab in the jugular. Sometimes it was a real pleasure to educate the lad.

Hawker hanked the reins up with a last jerk, looking like he knew what he was about, which was a tribute to his acting skills. “I’m going to boil your entrails down and make goddamn donkey
glue.
”

“When yer through chatting with the livestock, maybe we can reconnoiter a bit. Take the back garden, down to that shed. Then go round the west side.” He did a slice and circle, saying the same thing in hand-talk. After this, the gesture would be enough. Hawker learned the first time.

The boy stuck to the wet grass where it was quiet and let the boxwood hedge screen him from sight, taking city skills and applying them. He was beginning to move like a countryman.

They had Chateau de Fleurignac to themselves. No Jacobin radicals waved official papers. No servants clacked buckets at the well or broke dishes in the kitchen. No chickens underfoot. No horses in the stable. Not even a dog came out to discuss meum et tuum with trespassers.

No sign of the mad, old Marquis de Fleurignac or his daughter.

In the tavern in Voisemont, they said the old man had escaped before the Jacobins came to arrest him and drag him back to Paris, to the guillotine. He’d driven away in a coach and four, his pockets stuffed with jewels. He’d been seen going north to join the armies attacking France.

Another contingent claimed he’d been spirited away by one of the fraternities of heroes and fools who flipped a finger at the Revolution and rescued aristos. He was hid in the false bottom of a wagon, joggling along the road to the coast.

Then there was a lively group that said the marquis had been trapped in the fire. Oh, yes. They’d seen him with their own eyes, beating at the windows to get out. Burning like a torch. He was buried under eight feet of ashes with a fortune in gold clutched in his charred, bony fists. All a man had to do was dig him up.

Himself, he thought de Fleurignac had never been at the chateau. De Fleurignac was a city man. He’d gone to ground where he felt safe. Paris. That’s where he’d find him and his damned list.

But De Fleurignac’s daughter had been here. In the tavern there was complete agreement she’d been in the house when the Jacobins came. Nobody speculated on what had become of her. They passed quick glances back and forth and said nothing. Always interesting, what people didn’t talk about.

He looked around, writing his report in his head.

Chateau de Fleurignac was the size of his father’s house, Bengeat Court. It was the same age as Bengeat, too. Sixteenth century. Built with the local granite they’d been passing in every field all the way from the coast. The roof had caved in unevenly when the timbers went, making a gray hunchback of a ruin. Every window was topped with a fan of black soot.

Statues had toppled from their niches at the roofline. A stone hand, holding a scroll, lay in fragments at his feet. The broken line of marble over there was the drape of a toga. Late classical work. Roman, not Gallo-Roman. Emperors and poets, brought crashing down by the farmers of Voisemont-en-Auge. A lonely end, a long way from the sun of Italy.

In the neat formal gardens, the marble statues of nymphs had been systematically beheaded. That was the fashion in France these days. Beheading.

Hawker threaded his way across the rubble of the courtyard, deft and fastidious about where he put his feet. “What’s the word . . . that long animal?” He slithered his hand sinuously. “On the ground. With fur. The mean one.”

He meant weasel, probably.
“Belette.”

“That’s it. I’m going to drop weasels down their long, furry donkey ears. Let them chew on their brains.”

“That’ll work.”

“I want ’em to die slow, so I can take my time and savor it. There’s nobody in the gardens, alive or dead. The grass is all churned up with carts and horses. Four different carts, since you’re going to ask. And there is nothing anywhere here worth stealing.” The broken chairs, muddy silk, and torn paintings got a scathing appraisal. “I will give you my expert opinion. You can loot a place or you can burn it to the ground. It’s a mistake trying to do both at once.”

“Bad planning on somebody’s part. See that, up there?” Lead had melted from the roof and cooled into thick black icicles.

“That’s . . . ah . . .” Hawker rubbed his forehead, tracking down the French word. “Lead.”

“Right. Lead. That’s about the third most important thing here, so I’m taking an interest in it. Why?”

Hawker didn’t know. He hated not knowing. “Reminds you of the lead soldiers you played with as a nipper?”

Very funny. “There’s a shortage of lead in France. That’s three—maybe three and a half—tons of it. They’ll hack that down to make bullets for the Republic. We’ll be dodging that lead, one of these days, on some battlefield.”

Cold eyes looked out of an unlined face. “You, maybe. Not me. It’s stupid men who die on battlefields.”

Not an ounce of patriot in you, boy. Considering the hellhole you come from back in London, I can’t think of any reason there should be.
“I’d be careful, saying that. The gods have a sense of humor. Not a nice one. We’ll camp here tonight.”

Fire had played favorites with the outbuildings. The dairy house was intact. The carriage house, burned out completely. The carriages, hauled into the open, overturned, and set on fire. Nothing left of them but the wood frame and hanging leather straps. The stable was untouched.

When his father was angry with him or his brothers were on a rampage, he’d slept in the stables at Bengeat. But he didn’t like to sleep closed in, in hostile country. The orangerie was a better bet. “That way. Let’s get in out of the rain.”

The orangerie was open to the wind, a disorder with a roof over it. Every window was broken, the orange trees trampled, the planters thrown down on their sides. The hothouse plants had been stomped into the tiles. Glass covered the ground, thick near the walls, and scattered out in every direction for a dozen yards, glinting.

He made a circuit of the place. Open space on three sides. He’d see visitors coming through those big, naked windows and hear ’em walking on glass. He hated getting sneaked up on.

Hawker followed him, crunching glass into the gravel. “The boys in that stinking little village waited years to do this.”

“Did they?”

“They dreamed of it. They’d sit in those pig houses in the village with the shutters closed and the wind leaking in. They’d think about these fancy weeds in here, being coddled, all warm and happy behind glass. Down there, they were freezing in the dark. Up here, they were growing flowers.”

“That’s fixed, then. No more flowers.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hawker stoop and pick up a rock, draw back and throw. Glass fell with a thin, silver discord. The heroic revolutionaries of Voisemont had missed one pane. Destruction was now complete.

“It would have bothered me all night, knowing there was one window left,” Hawker said.

“Anything else you need to break to make it homey in here?”

“That’ll do.” The boy poked at pottery pieces where somebody’d beaten an orchid apart, pot and all. “They hated this place. Hated it more than the big house. I’m surprised they didn’t take it down, stone by stone.”

“They may yet. It’s early days.”
Lots of hate in you, isn’t there? But you’re worth trying to save if you see things like that.
“Put the animals in the kitchen garden. If you walk them through any of this glass I’m going to make you pick it out of the hooves with your teeth. And fetch some straw. We’ll put it between us and the ground. No reason we shouldn’t sleep soft tonight.”

“Straw. I love luxury.”

Three barn swallows shot out of the gable end of the stable, sudden as arrows. If he’d been facing the other way, he would have missed it.

It probably didn’t mean a thing. Birds pick any odd minute to get spooked. But the hairs stood up on the back of his neck. And the donkeys were nervous.
Somebody’s watching us.

“What?” The boy’s hand hovered over the knife he kept hidden under his waistband.

“Don’t turn.”

“Where are they?”

“The stable. Far left end. You walk off slow and get out of the line of fire. Go busy yourself with our four-footed brothers.”

“Your brothers, maybe. Not mine.” He gave a fluid shrug for anyone watching—that was a damned eloquent French shoulder he was developing—and sauntered off, whistling, without a backward glance. The boy was born for this work. He’d make a spy of him yet. If he didn’t have to kill him.

He strolled out to the six-foot stone wall that edged the kitchen garden, adjusting his trousers like a man picking a good spot to piss. When he had a substantial boxwood between him and the stable, he boosted himself up and over the wall and dropped into an herb bed on the other side.

Basil crushed underfoot when he landed. He was going to smell like basil. Going to yell his approach to all and sundry. Couldn’t be helped. He loped along the garden wall, keeping in its cover, staying on the dirt so it was quiet. Thirty feet, and he was coming up behind the stable. He went back over the wall again. Nobody on guard. All quiet. All deserted.

The feeling that somebody waited inside got stronger and stronger.

The back door to the tack room was open. He stalked forward, hunting whatever waited for him in there.

SHE KNEW HOW TO STAY STILL. THAT WAS THE FIRST important thing Doyle learned about her. She had a controlled patience that made her just about invisible. Most people couldn’t pass two minutes without fidgeting.

The woman stood in the shadow under the stable loft, outlined against the window, watching the courtyard. Breaths slipped in and out of her body like ghosts. Her face was turned away from him. She wore country clothes, like an upper servant or a farm wife. Dark blue skirt. White apron. A plain linen fichu tied around her shoulders. She had clogs on her feet. Her hair was pulled back from her face and braided in a thick tail that hung down her back, tied at the bottom with a scrap of bright red cloth. Her arms crossed her chest, one over the other, hugging tight and protective.

The smear of mud on her skirt and the scratches on her arms said she’d been hiding in the woods, living rough. She’d be one of the household—a lady’s maid or seamstress or the wife of the steward.

The stable window she’d picked had a wide, unobstructed view of the chateau and the avenue between the coach house and the back lane. By chance or planning, she’d picked a first-rate lookout post.

Even as he thought that, her hand went to the back of her neck. She could feel when eyes were on her, a skill that wasn’t as common as mice in a closet.

She turned. Saw him. The instant stretched tight.

He’d put himself between her and the back door. She hadn’t thought of keeping two lines of retreat. One for your enemy to block off. One so you can run like hell.

Skirt and apron whirled. She exploded into flight, down the stalls, long braid trailed out behind her. He caught her halfway to the door. Wrapped his arms around her and held on.

She twisted and tried to rake her nails at his face. When he caught her wrists, she curled like an eel and bit the hand that held her, digging her teeth deep.

Well, that hurt.
“I’m not going to—” A sabot hit his shin. “God’s . . . tortoises. Will you hold still? I’m trying not to damage you.” He shifted his grip and she broke a hand free and pulled out a knife.